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Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Top 5 Wednesday: Book Trends I'm Tired Of

Greetings Fellow Book Dragons!

Top 5 Wednesday is a weekly meme within the book community that was created by Lainey of GingerReadsLainey, but is now hosted by Sam of Thoughts on Tomes. If you're interested in participating, find out more on the Goodreads group.

This week's topic is Book Trends I'm Tired Of. These are the things that you're tired of seeing within the publishing world. This could be anything from something that seems to be on every cover to the popularity of certain troupes in a particular genre. Whatever it is that annoys you, let it out loudly and proudly!

In no particular order, here are the trends that I'm tired of:

1. Every new thriller, suspense, or mystery novel being touted as the "next Gone Girl."

I get it. Gone Girl was a great book! But honestly, at this point, it's been five years since its publication, and to me it's a bad sign when a new book is being pitched on how much it compares to Gone Girl rather than on the merits of its own content. I want Gillian Flynn's next novel, not someone else's sloppy seconds. It's done, it's now overdone, and it's time to move on. Which leads me to...

One of my biggest pet peeves is when people use "girl" in conversation with me, "Girl..." It's like nails on a chalkboard. So you can imagine what my eyes experience seeing it on so many book covers!

3. E-book novellas

I don't like reading on an e-book, so nothing annoys me more than discovering that a series I enjoy also has a novella only available in an e-book format. It's usually billed as bringing clarity to a significant moment for a character. And then it ends being less than 100 pages long! Come on! Each book in the trilogy or series was almost 500 pages, so you couldn't have just squeezed that little bit of content into the main books!

4. Kids books that tie in to a franchise, but offer no new content into that universe

My three-year-old is obsessed with Paw Patrol. Our family knows every character, story line, vehicle, and song. You name it and he can tell you all about it. When we go to bookstores, our local library, even the grocery store, it's hard to miss the multitude of board books, early readers, and story collections featuring these characters, but none of these books ever offer anything new. It generally amounts to a verbatim retelling of an episode. And regardless of your child's fandom, this exists across them all. I caught on pretty quickly to this racket and only get franchise books from the library now; however, family members enjoy surprising him with some of these books on occasion, and now he's even picked up on how horrible this situation is. Kids are a lot smarter than apparently the industry gives them credit for and when you have a child who loves to read would it be so hard to add additional content to these worlds like we see in comic books? He may not know what story arcs or character development is, but I can assure you I know one little boy who would love more content to enrich the world even more and I don't think he's the only one.

5. All the romance in young adult books

Relationships are important in our reading experience, especially when you're young. I remember reading Judy Blume's Forever when I was 16 and seeing that relationship in real life with a friend of mine at the time. I shared the book with her as a way to show that we aren't defined by a few choices in our lives and we do deserve better. It had such an effect that I never got the book back because the boyfriend found it and destroyed it because he didn't like the message. We need to safely see through reading what negative relationships look like to know what isn't acceptable. And the same goes for positive relationships. We need to see examples of great friendships, love, and respect look like. What I'm done with is the overly romanticized and sexual relationships. There is so much insta-love, love triangles, angst, and mind-blowing sex going on that it sets such unrealistic expectations on a young and vulnerable audience. Could we just tone down the romance and focus on other priorities in a character's development?

So those are the trends that I'm tired of. Are there any that you're sick of? Let me know in the comments!

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